


where the bad bones are

by belatrix



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 21:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6875173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He looks like a bad man,” Jayne Poole mutters.</p><p><em>Define ‘bad’</em>, Sansa is tempted to say, but the thing is― she already knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the bad bones are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [guineapiggie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guineapiggie/gifts).



 

 

 

The moral of the story is that there is no moral.

This was the first lesson.

 

 

 

He asks her, once, under a vast blanket of glittering stars, if she’s afraid of him. His eyes shine brighter than the night, and she sees that his hands are clean. His hands are always clean, and she wonders, briefly, if it would have been more fitting if they were dipped in red.

She had seen him holding a knife (the blade had curved, snake-like, catching the light in shocks of silver) to a man’s throat, once, but she knows now that he wouldn’t have done it. He was not made for violence, this man with his pristine suits and the way he twirls expensive cigarettes between pale fingers. Violence is what he lets others do for him.

When she doesn’t answer, he asks again.

Perhaps the question should be different. Perhaps he should say, _why aren’t you afraid of me?_

 

 

 

She walks into her father’s study, modest heels click-click-clicking away across the wooden floor. There is smoke wafting in the air, curling along her shoulders, getting tangled in her hair. Her father had never smoked _before_.

“Dad,” she says, and it sounds too soft, too quiet. A broken, tin-can thing. “How are you?”

He shakes his head, and as he turns away she thinks she can see a ghost lingering, dancing across his face. Her insides hurt.

“Stay away from Baelish,” is all he says in the end.

The room breathes out smoke along with him, and there’s something cold biting through her bones.

 

 

 

The thing that puzzles her―

she can’t really understand why she catches him staring at her sometimes.

It’s always stolen, fleeting moments, crammed into the spaces between seconds; it’s always glances, but to her they feel oddly prolonged, as if he were looking deep inside her skull, searching through nerve-endings, picking them apart.

“They say he was in love with her, you know,” Jayne Poole tells her one day, leaning close. “Your mum.” Her friend’s voice is a spiderweb of whispered secrets, fraying things.

 _Oh_ , she thinks, but still. It is not longing for a dead woman, what she sees in his eyes. At least, not entirely.

(She spends the night looking at faded photographs of her mother, tracing her thumb over Catelyn’s wide, warm smile, her once bright blue eyes. She realizes, with something like an ache, just _how_ much she looks like her.)

 

 

 

She tries to understand him. God, she _tries_.

 

 

 

“Sansa,” he says, all smooth tones and a secret smile, as if it were just for her, as if it might reach his eyes. He brings his lips to the back of her hand. “I was hoping to see you again.”

 _Stay away from Baelish_.

The room is alive with a hundred tongues, men and women swirling about, champagne overflowing. And he seems to be aware only of her, among the crystals and the music, and it makes something like a faint shudder rustle her spine. She decides that it is an odd combination of polite and crass, that he calls her by her first name. No _Miss Stark_ , no falsity, no feigned respect. She doesn’t know whether she’s grateful or if she hates him a little for it.

“Mister Baelish,” she returns, lowering her gaze. His fingers are cold around hers.

He leans forward, just a little, like a husband might lean towards his wife―

―and she feels dazed, almost, like all the thoughts dancing in her mind have been caught into a tangled web. “Please,” he says, and his eyes find hers, gray and bright and narcotic. “Call me Petyr.”

 

 

 

She overheard, once, one of her friends talking about the man she was in love with. It was impossible, her friend had said, never to happen, because he was so much older than her. Her parents would never accept it. It could never work, it was so wrong.

Sansa remembers this now, and thinks that none of it means anything. Age is nothing compared to that brightness of the eyes.

(It’s a brightness that is as terrifying as it is promising.)

 

 

 

The funeral is a quiet affair, at her father’s request. Eddard Stark wants to bid his last farewell to his wife among his family and closest friends, and Sansa is immensely grateful for it.

(They all say Catelyn was taken by the sickness, but there is a part of Sansa, small and restless and rattling against its cage, that doesn’t believe it. But she knows there is nothing more frightening than doubts and desperation keeping you up at night, fingers clutching at the bed sheets until you’ve drowned in tears, a pale tangle of shaking limbs.

So― “My mother was very ill,” she says, all solemn tones and a grave cloud across her face.)

She wears black, a dainty veil slanting over her eyes, shielding her from the world, as she sits at the front row and listens to the pastor speak incomprehensible words that she does not try to make sense of. It _hurts_ , this feeling, this merciless finality, knowing that she will never see her mother again. She tries, very hard, not to cry. _Be strong_ , she tells herself. _Be strong, be strong, be_ ―

He catches her gaze from across the narrow field, and she goes still, she goes cold. She has never seen such cool eyes before. He nods solemnly, as in recognition, as in wonder, and then he turns his gaze back to the coffin.

That is the first time.

 

 

 

She doesn’t know how she works up the courage to ask him.

Terror makes you brave, she reasons. It makes you light and weightless, dizzy, as if you’re floating, or dreaming. She knows girls have died for less.

“Did you kill my mother?” she asks, and she looks him in the eye and her voice doesn’t tremble. The words burst from her mouth like moths, like blackbirds, slicing through the stillness of the motel room.

The shock that twists his features is genuine, she’s certain of it. She knows not even _he_ can fake such darkened edges in his gaze. “Sansa―” he says, and she thinks he might kill _her_ , after all.

 _Girls have died for less_.

And then he smiles, slow and spreading and a thing filled with promise. It chills her core. “I came here to find who did it,” he tells her, and she knows it just might be the first truth he’s spoken to her.

 

 

 

“He looks like a bad man,” Jayne Poole mutters.

 _Define ‘bad’_ , Sansa is tempted to say, but the thing is― she already knows.

 

 

 

New York hums and shudders under the broken moonlight like a sleeping monster, and Sansa waits in a motel room, her hands folder over her purse, red nails digging into the skin of her palms.

He is twenty minutes late, and when he comes, he lays butterfly kisses along her neck and tells her she’s beautiful and her heart catches, just a little. He is in a good mood; someone has likely just died.

(In moments like this, when she curls and moans into his arms and he lets himself sigh and shiver, she imagines what running away with him might be like.)

 

 

 

“Your fiancé,” he says, and her gaze is drawn to the cigarette dangling between his fingers. “Joffrey.”

She stills, and is suddenly very aware of how close they are, how the pale artificial light is casting shadows over his face, black-and-white stripes across those otherwise indiscernible features.

“What about him?”

 

 

 

Of course she doesn’t love Joffrey. The thing that pains her the most is that she thought she did, once, but that’s a story for another time. She’s not a child any more. She feels far too empty and broken for that.

It’s not a marriage of convenience, not exactly, but she doesn’t care enough to bother with politics and how relationships between power families affect them, and she just― she feels so _tired_ of it all. She remembers wishing to find romance, she remembers her ideas of love glittering like gemstones in her mind’s eye.

The point is, you keep your mouth shut tight and your eyes cast downwards and sew a beautiful smile across your painted lips and become a good wife. This is not what they teach you at school, but it’s something you learn all the same.

 

 

 

It rains after the funeral, as if the skies were weeping for Catelyn Stark, cold and gray and pouring like sheets of silver blades over her tomb. Sansa would think it poetic, if she didn’t feel so dark and weightless, bled clean of tears. She follows the crowd inside the house and listens to their hushed whispers, like ancient incantations offered up to the clouds.

She finds her father in the kitchen, black suit and limp hair and a faraway gaze, and for a moment she stills and blinks, sharply, when she spots the second man.

“Sansa,” her father says, and his voice reminds her of secondhand smoke. “This is Mister Baelish.”

 _MIster_ Baelish smiles at her father like he’s murdering him, like he’s breaking through Eddard’s bones with his teeth, but then he has turned to her and his eyes are bright, too bright for his face. For the space of a single breath, she’s scared.

“Please,” he mutters, and he might as well be talking to a ghost. Half-reverent and half-mocking. Abruptly, she thinks he doesn’t look like the kind of man who would feel comfortable in a church. “Call me Petyr.”

 

 

 

“You could come away with me,” he tells her one night, whispers the words like liquid constellations against her throat. The motel room is small and dark and closing in around her like a vice.

And she just―

 

 

 

She’s sitting at her window when the phone rings, staring out into nothingness and trying to find a way through the mess in her brain.

She picks up on the fourth ring, and the curtains ―baby pink, she used to love pink― rustle around her shoulders with the winter breeze. “Sansa,” her father’s voice like panic, like recognition, in her ear. The receiver is steady in her hand. “Joffrey’s dead.”

For a moment, her world is filled with static.

 

 

 

When she finds out that people have died at his command, she is disgusted and terrified and thrilled and altogether unsurprised.

 _Stay away from Baelish_.

He sits across from her and he looks her in the eye like no grown man ever has, with a seriousness that suggests she might be more to him than a porcelain face, an insipid doll, a simple-minded child. He is so very still, and she feels the sudden impulse to shake him, to pour movement into him, to understand why his eyes are always so fever-bright when the rest of him isn’t.

 _Stay away from Baelish_.

She wants to ask him if this is why he came to her mother’s funeral, if this is the reason he blew right back into town; to have more people killed.

She won’t ask. Not yet. Not when he’s staring at her like that.

 

 

 

He calls her _sweetling_ and she’s sure it makes her hate him just a little, just a little bit, but it rolls off his tongue like a compliment and an insult all at once and she wants to crack his skull open just to see how his mind works.

She’s no longer terrified of what she’d find underneath his bones. It’s hard to be afraid of someone once you know how they moan in the dark.

“Do you love me?” she asks him, breathless, when they’re naked and pale and tangled in rough sheets. He doesn’t answer, and she’s almost grateful, she almost loves him then for not lying to her.

 

 

 

“Morals have no place in the game,” she heard him say once. He was on the phone, and she knew she’d never find out who it was he’d been talking to.

It’s strange, sometimes, how this is the one thing she’ll never forget about him. These words. She thinks that if she grows old and weary and forgets the lines of his face, the color of his eyes, the splay of his palm against her ribs ―even if she forgets everything, she’ll still remember this.

 

 

 

Unlike her mother’s, Joffrey’s funeral is grand and limned in gold and crimson. Cersei weeps into a handkerchief with a swirling ‘ _L_ ’ sewn into the fabric, bleeding through the white satin like rubies, and Tywin is a figure like the statue of a primordial god, all marble edges and stone at the seams.

Sansa sits, poised and pale and wearing black, Jayne Poole wide-eyed and fluttering at her side. As Cersei’s tears turn into daggers, Sansa feels her friend’s breath like a secret close to her ear.

“They say Baelish skipped town,” Jayne whispers.

Sansa keeps looking straight ahead as her insides fall and shatter and break apart. She arches an eyebrow. “Did he?”

 

 

 

The first time he suggests he might take her with him when he goes (because he _will_ go, this is something she knows as surely as if it were a physical wound, a bloody curl into her flesh that will never heal), she’s sprawled across the motel bed, face pressed into the sheets, her hair a red slash across the pillow. The air smells of cheap soap and sex and dust, and she watches as he slips on his shirt and thinks that perhaps she should take a shower too.

“What are you doing here?” is all he asks, and he still won’t look at her, gazing out the stained window glass instead.

Her fingers, she realizes as she furrows her brow at his question, have been drawing abstract patterns across the mattress. “You’re the one who suggested we meet here. It’s safe, you said.”

He lets out a sound like a chuckle and a sigh and it makes her wonder, not for the first time, if she’s being pulled into a game the rules of which no one will ever bother to explain to her. “I _meant_ , what are you doing in this city? With these people? Why don’t you get up and leave? There’s nothing left for you here, not any more.”

“My family is here,” and it’s quiet and it’s soft and it’s broken and she knows he might laugh at her for it, and she doesn’t think she has it in her to feel angry about it.

Surprisingly enough, he only shakes his head. “Half your family is dead and the other half doesn’t give a damn about you or has simply forgotten you exist. And your _father_ ,” ―she knows know, knows why his voice always seems to become darker, angrier, when he talks about Eddard Stark― “is hardly fit to raise you properly on his own, poor grief-stricken widower that he has become.”

“He loves me―”

“This has absolutely nothing to do with anything, sweetling.”

“He’s my _father_.”

“Very unfortunately so.”

She shifts, sits up, cold white sheets sticking with sweat rippling around the lines of her body as her face hardens and her toes hit the floor. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she bites out, even though she thinks she already knows, even though he won’t answer, even though she doesn’t _want_ him to―

“I never stay in the same place for too long,” he says simply, like he might be talking about the weather. “Should you decide to leave this town behind as well―”

He never finishes that sentence, but, really, he doesn’t have to.

 

 

 

The day after her mother’s funeral, the world is quiet and gray and Sansa has shoved all her black clothes into the farthest corner of her closet.

Her father is in the kitchen, his face buried in his hands. He looks up when he hears her, and the glittering emptiness in his eyes makes her want to scream and cry.

But it won’t leave her, this feeling of dread and anticipation, that incessant shiver that has been plaguing her bones since the reception. It had been something like recognition, something like fear, and it’s a mess and it’s dangerous and it’s so, _so_ ―

“Who was that man you introduced me to, yesterday?” she asks, low and soft lest her father break apart all over again. Because it’s all important, she _knows_ it is, she does, and there are so many things inside her that scream at her to start running. “Who is Petyr Baelish?”

 

 

 

The moral of the story is that there is no moral.

The receiver is always in her hand, these days, but the phone never rings. And it’s fine. She can wait. She can be cold and beautiful and angry, and she can love and hate as much as she wishes. She can remember, she can hope, she can despair. She can steal one of her father’s guns and throw it into her dainty black purse, and climb on the first bus that will take her close to an ending.

She thinks she understands, now, that this was never meant to be a love story. There is always some sort of moral in the best love stories, this is what she learned when she was younger.

She can wait.


End file.
